INTRODUCTION
This paper, although it deals with a scientific subject, is not
a scientific paper. I have tried to simplify the science for a non-scientific
reader. Inevitably, this will be seen by some, particularly other scientists,
as an oversimplification. I urge them to refer to the detailed scientific
material given in the reports of the International Whaling Commission's
Scientific Committee and associated papers. For the same reason, rather
than clutter the text with references, I have supplied a short bibliography
at the end. Although the paper concentrates on the history and development
of whale management, it is in the context of using this as a case study
to suggest an approach to the management of all natural living resources.
BACKGROUND
The history of whaling is a sad one and certainly not one that
can be put forward as an example of successful sustainable management of
a renewable resource. From the start of the `commercial' exploitation of
whales by western man, the story is one of eventual over-exploitation,
beginning with the Basques from the 12th century, who took the North Atlantic
right whale (Eubalaena glacialis), so-called because it was the right whale
to catch (large, slow-swimming, floated when dead, rich in oil and baleen).
By the end of the 19th century, right whales in both hemispheres, as well
as the related Arctic species, the bowhead whale (Balaena mysticetus) had
been severely depleted. The North Atlantic right whale remains the most
endangered of the great whales, numbering fewer than 400 animals, despite
almost no catching for a hundred years.
Modern commercial whaling began with the invention of the explosive harpoon in the 1860s by the Norwegian Svend Foyn combined with the development of fast steam-powered catcher boats. This allowed whalers to take the faster swimming rorqual whales (e.g. the blue whale, Balaenoptera musculus, and the fin whale, B. physalus).
The age of Antarctic exploration brought with it tales of untold numbers of whales. At first, technology required that whaling was carried out from land stations, thereby limiting the area that could be exploited. The first Antarctic whaling station was established in 1904 on South Georgia and took 195 whales. By 1913, there were six true land stations, and 21 floating factories that had to be moored in suitable harbours. The total catch was 10,760 whales. Perhaps the decisive innovation was the invention of the stern slipway for factory ships in 1925, thereby allowing them to operate in the pelagic areas of the Antarctic. By the 1930/31 season there were 41 factory ships operating and they took over 37,000 whales. This overproduction led to a catastrophic decline in the price of whale oil.
While it would be nice to think that it was the fear of overexploiting whale stocks that was the driving force behind moves to limit catching, despite attempts under the auspices of the League of Nations to establish some international control, it was the fear of low prices that led to the first effective limitation of catches, under the production agreement negotiated amongst themselves by the whaling companies.
Whaling operations effectively ceased during the Second World War. The war had caused a world shortage in the supply of fats and several nations had their eyes on profits from pelagic whaling. It was in this light, and the experience gained in developing international agreements just before the war, that discussions were held in London in 1945 and in Washington in 1946 on the international regulation of whaling.
ESTABLISHMENT OF THE INTERNATIONAL WHALING COMMISSION
At the 1946 Conference, the International Convention for the Regulation
of Whaling was signed. Membership was open to all nations, whaling and
non-whaling alike. The Convention, which established the International
Whaling Commission (IWC) was seen as a major step forward and a precedent
for international regulation of natural resources.
One reason for this is that its stated aim was `to provide for the proper conservation of whale stocks and thus make possible the orderly development of the whaling industry'. Conservation was thus given equal billing with economics. This was a laudable aim, but finding the balance between `conservation' and the "interests of ... the whaling industry" was not going to be easy.
A further advantage of the Convention was that it recognised that regulations would probably have to be changed from time to time, and established a mechanism whereby regulatory measures (catch limits, seasons, size limits, inspection, etc.) could be amended when necessary by a three-quarters majority of members voting (excluding abstentions). This allowed a rapid (by inter-governmental standards) response to changing circumstances.
The Convention also formally assigned importance to the need for scientific advice, requiring that amendments to the regulations `shall be based on scientific findings'. To this end the Commission established a Scientific Committee comprising scientists nominated by member governments (and latterly invited experts when appropriate). The difficulty of reconciling scientific advice with the `interests of...the whaling industry' was to prove a major factor in the history of the Commission, particularly up to the 1970s.
However, despite its progressive nature, there are aspects of the Convention that have attracted criticism, particularly over the last 20 years. For example, any government can `object' to any decision with which it does not agree within a certain time frame. This (along with the right of member nations to unilaterally issue permits to catch whales for scientific purposes), has led to accusations of the Commission being `toothless', but without the objection procedure the Convention would probably have never been signed.
EARLY MANAGEMENT BY THE IWC
From a management point of view, a more serious flaw was that at
a time when `free trade' was an important issue, especially for the USA,
it was agreed that the Commission could neither restrict operations by
numbers or nationality nor allocate quotas by operation. Although it may
be questioned whether the Commission could have agreed to national quotas
or numbers of vessels, certainly if such limitations had been reached this
would have reduced the management problems associated with increasing numbers
of vessels chasing limited quotas.
Perhaps the most serious problem of early management was the use of the Blue Whale Unit (BWU) as a means of setting catches. This had its origins in the first industry-led regulations in 1931/32. In terms of oil yield, it was considered that one blue whale was equal to 2 fin, 2.5 humpback (Megaptera novaeangliae) or 6 sei (B. borealis) whales (based on their relative oil yields). In 1945, a catch limit of 16,000 BWU, 46% of the 1930/31 catch, was set (suggested by three scientists as being a `reassuring' value in between their estimate of 15-20,000!). The flaw in such a system is apparent - it allows catching of depleted species below levels at which catching that species alone would be economically unviable. This is apparent from the catch data (Fig. 1) which reveal that as blue whale catches declined, so fin whale catches (the next largest species) increased until they too were overexploited and sei whale catching began.
This is not the place to discuss in detail the problems that engulfed the IWC (and thereby the whale stocks) up to the early 1960s. Suffice it to say that a combination of economics, greed and lack of biological information led to a situation so critical, that even the most extreme of the whaling countries recognised the need for effective action.
Largely as a result of conflicting advice from within the Scientific Committee (which at that time included few, if any, experts in the rapidly developing field of population dynamics), three independent scientists (the `Three Wise Men'; Douglas Chapman, Kay Allen and Sidney Holt, later augmented by John Gulland) were asked to review the status of Antarctic whale stocks. In 1962/63, a call from the Scientific Committee for quotas by species was rejected but the total quota was reduced to 10,000 BWUs and humpback whales given protection throughout the Southern Hemisphere. The report of the independent scientists formed the basis of the reductions in quotas from a `voluntary' 8,000 (no quota was agreed) in 1964/65, to 2,300 in 1971/72 due to a commitment to set catches below the sustainable yield. Blue and humpback whales were given complete protection in the mid-1960s, albeit long overdue, and Norway, the Netherlands and the UK withdrew from Antarctic operations. In practice however, there was no agreed scientific procedure in place to calculate recommended catch limits. The values chosen were largely the result of political negotiations.
THE NEW MANAGEMENT PROCEDURE
One of the key meetings affecting the Commission in the 1970s was
in fact a non- IWC meeting. In 1972, the UN Conference on the Human Environment
passed a resolution which called for an increase in whale research, a ten-year
`moratorium' on commercial whaling and a strengthening of the IWC. The
UN resolution was taken seriously by the IWC. Proposals for ten-year moratoria
were tabled but failed to reach the required three-quarters majority, largely
because the IWC Scientific Committee did not find scientific evidence to
support the idea. It had fought long and hard for management on a stock-by-stock
basis (Antarctic catches were first set by species in 1972) and believed
this to be the most sensible approach - if required, each stock could be
independently protected. By 1976, a permanent Secretariat had been established
in Cambridge, and an International Decade of Cetacean Research had been
declared.
By far the most important development however, was the adoption of a management procedure (the so-called New Management Procedure, NMP, Fig. 2) that was aimed at bringing all stocks of whales to an optimum level at which the largest number of whales can be taken consistently (the maximum sustainable yield or MSY) without depleting the stock. The procedure required that all stocks had to be classified into one of the three categories below (assuming the MSY level to occur at 60% of the population size before exploitation).
(1) Initial Management Stocks: those over 72% of the original stock size; catch limits are always set below MSY and to ensure that the stock is not reduced below 60%, the MSY level.
(2) Sustained Management Stocks: those between 54-72% of the original stock size; catch limits are again set below MSY, the degree below depending on how far below the MSY level the stock is.
(3) Protection Stocks: those below 54% of the original stock size; no catches are allowed on such stocks.
This procedure was regarded as a major step forward in the management of whaling, designed to bring stocks to an optimum level and giving protection to stocks well before they became endangered. It also appeared to take the issue of catch limits largely out of the hands of the politicians; the Scientific Committee would calculate them according to the procedure contained in the legally binding Schedule, and one could expect the Commission to `rubber-stamp' the numbers proposed. It would conserve whale stocks and allow long-term planning by the industry - the elusive blend of science and industry appeared to have been found!
However, this rather rosy picture did not last long. It involved two fundamental assumptions: (i) near-perfect knowledge of the dynamics of all whale populations by the scientists; (ii) political agreement that even sustainable whaling was desirable. Both of these were beginning to be questioned. However, for the purposes of this paper, only the former is relevant.
The NMP did indeed represent an advance in developing a scientific framework for management. However, limitations became apparent as soon as it began to be employed in the `real' world. I will discuss the major difficulties here.
The NMP assumed that management stock boundaries could be drawn for all whale species in all oceans, and that these `stocks' could be classified into one of the above three categories, without ever defining what a `stock' was or what the minimum criteria for drawing up such boundaries should be.
Although the method of calculating catch limits for a defined `stock' was specified and easy to understand, an acceptable way of obtaining the required values of `initial' population size and `current' population size was not specified. Without going into details, most methods required the use of computer models to simulate the behaviour of the exploited populations. These models required estimates of certain life history parameters (such as natural mortality rates, pregnancy rates, recruitment rates), and in effect assumed that management stocks were the equivalent of biological stocks.
In practice, although crude estimates of these parameters could be obtained, they could not be obtained to the level of precision required, even assuming the models really did reflect the dynamics of the populations. In addition, direct estimates of current population size rarely existed. Current and initial population sizes were obtained from the population models and annual estimates of catch-per-unit-effort (of varying levels of intricacy and comparability), assuming a direct relationship between population size and CPUE - e.g. if the CPUE decreased by 50% then the population had also decreased by 50%. This approach is very common in fisheries management.
Whilst many of the difficulties in obtaining the required estimates were detailed in the Committee's reports, once `best' estimates had been agreed, however `shaky', they were then used in the models, the handle was turned and catch limits, accurate to the nearest whale, emerged.
Apart from the spurious degree of scientific knowledge this implied, this had two other undesirable properties for a management procedure. The first was that it did not `reward' the provision of data or additional research effort. Attempts were made to define and classify all stocks and `best' estimates were given the same weight, irrespective of whether they were derived from large sample sizes or merely by analogy with other areas or species. The second was that catch limits could vary wildly from one year to the next, for example with the addition of a single data point in a CPUE series or a small change in a stock boundary line.
This may seem a largely damning summary of the NMP. In its defence and the defence of the Scientific Committee it should be said that much of the criticism not only comes with the benefit of hindsight but also that it came from the Committee itself. Its fundamental principles that species should be managed at the stock level, that catch limits should be set that allow stocks to approach optimal sizes, that protection should be given before stocks are `endangered' and that biological considerations should over-ride economic ones remain good.
THE REVISED MANAGEMENT SCHEME (RMS)
The 1979 meeting was a turning point in the Commission's history.
Doubts were expressed by some members of the Scientific Committee concerning
not only the theoretical concepts behind the NMP but the ability of scientists
even to estimate numbers of whales. In some quarters, both within and outside
the Commission, the morality of whaling was being questioned, irrespective
of the status of the stocks. Moratorium proposals were again tabled and
although a proposal to end land station whaling did not obtain the required
three-quarters majority, a proposal to end pelagic whaling for all species
except minke whales was adopted and a Sanctuary was declared for the Indian
Ocean outside the Antarctic. Whereas the onus in the past had been for
positive evidence of a decline before a reduction in catch limits was agreed,
the tendency now was towards positive evidence being required if a catch
limit was to be set.
By the 1982 meeting, the IWC had agreed to a pause in commercial whaling (or to use popular terminology, a `moratorium') from 1986. The amendment to the regulations had included a clause that `the Commission will undertake a comprehensive assessment of the effects of this decision on whale stocks and consider modification of this provision and the establishment of other catch limits'.
The term `Comprehensive Assessment' had not been defined by the Commission and eventually the Scientific Committee itself had to define what it believed it to be: `an in-depth evaluation of the status of all whale stocks in the light of management objectives and procedures ... that ... would include the examination of current stock size, recent population trends, carrying capacity and productivity'. [My italics]
This definition was accepted by the Commission. Thus at the outset, the Scientific Committee recognised the importance of learning from its experience with the NMP. Perhaps the most important lesson was that it had to be honest about the limitations of both the data it had and the data it was likely to obtain. To put it crudely there was no point in developing a management procedure that required estimates of current population size accurate to the nearest whale when, for example, the best that might be expected was an estimate that the population lay somewhere between 10,000 to 20,000.
Clearly it is not acceptable to try out experimental management procedures in the wild, if they are so `experimental' that extinction is a possible outcome. Apart from the serious consequences of `getting it wrong', in long-lived species such as whales it would take a long time before one would find out whether or not it really worked. So the Scientific Committee resorted to computer whales and simulated population behaviour over a long time period (100 years was chosen). At the start of the development process, five procedures were proposed and subjected to thousands of trials to `test their robustness' - to see if they worked. Of course, initially the testing was relatively simple - to see if they worked when they had available the information they thought they would have at the levels of accuracy they expected. However, the procedures had also to work when knowledge was not perfect and data were limited i.e. the procedures had to be realistic in terms of likely scientific knowledge and take into account scientific uncertainty. The various suggested procedures had to `pass' a series of trials of increasing difficulty. Table 1 lists just some of the problems the procedures had to face. The competition among the alternative procedures led to dramatic improvements in their ability to cope with the trials and some procedures were improved by incorporating elements from other procedures. In the extreme, the perfect procedure would be one which arrived at safe catch limits and required no information! In the end, after several years of work (which amongst other things revealed that CPUE data, except in very rare cases, should not be used as a measure of relative abundance), matters were narrowed down to just two essential parameters: estimates of current abundance taken at regular intervals; and knowledge of past and present catches.
Table 1
Some examples of the trials the management procedure had to be able to cope with:
Several different population models and associated assumptions
Different starting population levels, ranging from 5% to 99% of the
`initial' population size
Different MSY levels, ranging from 40% to 80%
Different MSY rates, ranging from 1% to 7% (including changes over
time)
Various levels of uncertainty and biases in population size
Changes in carrying capacity (including reduction by half)
Errors in historic catch records (including underestimation by half)
Catastrophes (irregular episodic events when the population is halved)
Various frequencies of surveys
Objectives
However, we have not yet discussed one very important aspect of
any management procedure - by what criteria do you judge if it `works'
and given that it works how do you select among alternatives? In other
words we must define the objectives of the procedure. To some extent it
is relatively easy to arrive at `extreme' objectives for any natural resource:
(1) that the resource is not driven to extinction;
(2) that the maximum sustainable harvest is achieved.
It quickly becomes apparent however that within these two headings (state of the resource/demands of the industry) there are a number of options (see Fig. 3 for some examples). In addition it also clear that there has to be some trade-off between objectives: for example the lowest risk of extinction occurs when there is no harvesting - this option, however, results in no chance at all of achieving the objective of maximum sustainable harvest.
The setting of objectives and the relative weight given to those objectives
(the trade-offs) require political rather than scientific decisions, although
the scientist clearly has an obligation to explain the implications of
any decisions that might be taken to the politicians, for example by providing
them with a range of specific options.
In the case of the IWC, three objectives were set by the Commission,
which can broadly be summarised as follows:
(1) catch limits should be as stable as possible;
(2) catches should not be allowed on stocks below 54% of the estimated carrying capacity (as in the NMP);
(3) the highest possible continuing yield should be obtained from the stock.
Similarly, the Commission decided that greater priority should be given to objective (2). The quantitative component of this was achieved by the Commission choosing among three options provided to it by the Scientific Committee.
The Catch Limit Algorithm
In the light of the above objectives and the results of trials
to test the ability of the procedures to account for uncertainty in a wide
variety of factors (see Table 1), the Committee recommended one procedure
to the Commission (that of Justin Cooke) and this was accepted. It is called
the CLA or catch limit algorithm and specifies the way in which catch limits
are calculated from the required information.
So, how does the CLA work? Very simply it recognises that initially the `true' situation of the stock is poorly known i.e. that there is a wide range of possible values for the level of depletion of the stock and its productivity. Similarly it recognises the two kinds of uncertainty in the estimate of current population size: that the methodology used to estimate abundance, although it produces a `best' estimate can actually only give a range within which the population size probably lies; and secondly that the estimate may be biassed.
The CLA is what is known as a `feedback' procedure - as more information accumulates from sighting surveys (and catches if taken), then the estimates of necessary parameters are refined. In this way the procedure constantly monitors itself. By using a range of values to account for the uncertainty, the CLA produces a wide range of possible catch limits and assesses their likelihood (see Fig. 4), from which one has to be chosen. The figure shows a frequency distribution of possible catch limits taking the likelihood of their being the correct value into account.
How a single value is chosen is again largely a political decision, balancing the conservation and exploitation objectives. In fact, what the Commission chose, as mentioned earlier, is a more cautious approach that translated into 41% of the possible catches being less than the actual value chosen and 59% being higher. Catch limits are set for periods of five years. This is one of the ways in which the objective of stability of catches is met. Catches are also phased out if new sightings estimates are not obtained at the requisite intervals.
As more information accumulates from new surveys, the CLA improves its estimates of parameter values. This in turn will narrow the range of possible catch limits.
The Revised Management Procedure
The CLA was initially tested on the assumption that it is applied
to known biological stocks. One final major area of uncertainty remained
to be addressed: the question of stock identity. Fig. 5 illustrates one
of the problems that can arise if stock identity is unknown. It is not
appropriate here to go into the details of how the stock identity problem
has been resolved. In short, it involves dividing up an ocean area or region
into sufficiently small areas, based on the known or suspected biological
information and testing with simulations what the effect of errors in stock
identity assumptions are, for that particular region and species. At present,
this has only been carried out for minke whales (B. acutorostrata) in the
North Atlantic and Southern Hemisphere. Until similar `implementation trials'
have been carried out for other species in other areas, their catch limits
will be zero under the RMP. For many species, such as blue whales in the
Southern Hemisphere, it is clear that it would be a very long time before
catches would be allowed under the RMP.
The CLA plus the rules about, amongst other things, details of stock boundaries, allocation of catches to small areas, what to do if many more of one or other sex are caught, and when complete reviews of all available information should be carried out, form the Revised Management Procedure or RMP.
In addition, the Scientific Committee has developed guidelines for how sighting surveys should be conducted and how the data are to be analysed if the resultant estimates are to be considered to be of sufficient quality to be used in the CLA.
This is a brief and simplified summary of the development of the RMP. In conclusion, I would say that the culmination of eight years' work by the Scientific Committee is the most rigorously tested management procedure for a natural resource yet developed. It sets a standard for the management of all marine and other living resources.
In 1993, the Scientific Committee unanimously recommended the Procedure to the Commission, noting that all the scientific aspects of the work had been completed. It was not officially adopted by the Commission in its final form that year. In 1994, after further trials addressing environmental change and under-reporting of historic catches, and responding to some questions posed by a panel set up by the US Government, the Commission accepted the RMP. Its actual implementation in whale management (at least for those stocks for which it has been tested), is of course a political decision. It depends on a number of non-scientific issues that are not appropriate for discussion in this paper, ranging from inspection and enforcement, through humaneness of killing techniques, to philosophical considerations as to whether whales should be killed commercially under any circumstances. Inspection has scientific implications as the CLA requires accurate knowledge of catches taken while it is in operation (as opposed to historic catches). Recent revelations about the massive extent of Soviet falsification of catch records since the 2nd world war reinforces the need for a foolproof reporting system. It should be noted that the procedure as developed is very conservative and certainly more conservative than anything that has gone before, even though, ostensibly, the protection level is the same as in the NMP. In some ways this is intuitively obvious. Any procedure that explicitly takes into account large levels of uncertainty, and can cope with the wide range of scenarios tested will have to be conservative.
In very general terms this is illustrated by the fact that typically, annual catches after only one survey has been completed will be less than half a percent of the estimated population size e.g. if the population is thought to number 10,000 animals, the annual catch will be less than 50.
The level of conservatism is a reflection of the relative priorities assigned to the objectives, the level of uncertainty in the information on abundance, productivity and stock identity of whale stocks, and the fact that many years are required before the CLA refines its estimates of the required parameters.
CONCLUSION
It would be a great shame if this major advance in the scientific
approach to natural resource management in general was lost as a result
of the controversy over whether whaling should or should not occur at all,
much of which, although a perfectly valid area for debate, is not of a
scientific nature.
The methodology, principles and fundamental approach adopted in developing the RMP remain valid for the management of all natural resources. In particular, the history of fisheries management, although it does not attract the public interest that whaling does, reveals that a new approach is desperately needed if sustainable, rather than boom-bust fisheries are to exist.
The important features to be noted are:
(1) scientists must accept their limitations and build the inevitable uncertainty explicitly into the management procedure;
(2) data and analysis requirements for the procedure must be realistic and specified - resource users should recognise that unless these requirements are met they will not be able to utilise the resource;
(3) procedures must be rigorously tested by computer simulation for both realistic and even unlikely scenarios by computer simulations, before they are used in the real world - development should be an iterative procedure (the competition among several approaches was found to be helpful, rather than simply concentrating on the one that initially seemed most promising);
(4) the objectives of the procedure (both in terms of the `interests' of the resource and the user) must be explicitly stated and assigned relative priorities - this requires the co-operation of management scientists with those who take the decisions;
(5) procedures should involve a `feedback' mechanism that continuously monitors the status of the resource and thus provides an internal check on the performance of the procedure.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Great credit belongs to those scientists who, over many years,
developed their procedures. Even though only one was chosen in the end,
they all performed remarkably well and contributed to the success of the
eventual `winner': Justin Cooke, Bill de la Mare, Doug Butterworth, Andre
Punt, Kjartan Magn&;sson, Gunnar Stefánsson, Kazumi Sakaramoto and
Syoiti Tanaka. In addition, of course, many members of the IWC Scientific
Committee contributed to the development of the RMP. Particular thanks
should go to Geoff Kirkwood and Phil Hammond who chaired the meetings of
the sub-committee on management procedures and to Cherry Allison who carried
out much of the computing work required in the latter stages; all three
made useful comments on this manuscript.
SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Allen, K.R. 1980. Conservation and Management of Whales. University
of Washington Press, Seattle and Butterworth & Co., London. ix+110pp.
Donovan, G.P. 1991. A review of IWC stock boundaries. Rep. int. Whal. Commn (special issue 13):39- 68. Donovan, G.P. 1992. The International Whaling Commission: Given its past, does it have a future? pp. 23-44. In: J.J. Symoens (ed.) Symposium «Whales: Biology - Threats - Conservation». Royal Academy of Overseas Sciences, Brussels, Belgium. 261pp.
International Whaling Commission. Reports of the Scientific Committee, 1986-94. Rep. int. Whal. Commn Vols 36-44.
Tonnessen, J.N. and Johnsen, A.O. 1982. The History of Modern Whaling. C. Hurst & Co., London. xx+798pp.
Young, N.M. (ed). 1993. Examining the Components of a Revised Management Scheme. Center for Marine Conservation, Washington DC. [xii]+84pp+Appendice
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